


another round of bridge

by notearchiver



Category: Original Work
Genre: Bisexual Character, Death, F/F, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Non-Linear Narrative, Past Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-06
Updated: 2020-09-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:35:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26322763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notearchiver/pseuds/notearchiver
Summary: "Kind of perverse, isn't it?" Marissa snaps her gum and the sound echoes around the antechamber. In the viewing room, the mother of the corpse frowns. "Taking a job at a funeral home after your boyfriend dies, I mean."AKA: Chelsea learns how to play bridge.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4
Collections: We Die Like Fen 4: We Lived to Die Afen





	another round of bridge

**Author's Note:**

  * For [green_licorice](https://archiveofourown.org/users/green_licorice/gifts).



> **Additional content notes:** Russian roulette, references to (auto-)erotic asphyxiation

**2.**  
Chelsea sees the corpse when they bring it in. Just briefly, but it's enough.

She is in the back room, clipping the stems off the new order of carnations and sticking the flowers in miniature vials of water when the loading door opens, and she stops to watch the mock procession. First Konrad, walking backwards and gesturing with blue-gloved hands, then the men rolling the cart, its contents sealed in plastic. Usually the plastic is black, heavy and privacy-protecting. This time it is clear, the only distortions caused by crinkles between multiple layers. The body inside is male, young.

His hair is tangled in the broken bones of his skull.

**3.**  
Chelsea stands in the antechamber of the viewing room, a location where she is out of the way, easily available should the family need assistance, and, not so coincidentally, able to eavesdrop.

It's hour four of the six hour viewing, she has cleaned up the glass from two broken vases, and her ankles are getting stiff when things get interesting.

A small cadre of twenty-somethings, no more than five of them, really, traipses into the antechamber, shuffling their feet on the carpet and murmuring amongst themselves. They are, Chelsea immediately decides, not normal guests at a wake. The slacks and button up dress code has been discarded for worn jeans and stretched henleys, ratty topsiders and artfully unwashed hair. In the lead is a woman, a walking rectangle of broad shoulders and thin wrists accentuated by rolled up sleeves of a blue flannel shirt. One of the men behind her taps her shoulder, and she pauses before entering the viewing room, hand coming up to rest on the middle hinge of the propped-open door. As she turns to respond to the man, her eyes meet Chelsea's. She does not blink, only smiles, plum, lipstick-coated lips stretching until cracks where the lipstick does not reach appear.

It is Marissa.

**1.**  
One of the downsides of dating Pat—and, if Chelsea is being honest with herself, there were quite a few—was that he came with Marissa.

"She's been my best friend since high school, Chelsea," Pat said the night before she met Marissa for the first time. "We survived engineering at U of I together. I think you'll like her." He popped the top off the Molson with his teeth and handed her the beer. Chelsea took the bottle, but just settled it between her thighs and turned on the TV. The Cubs were losing to the Cardinals in the top of the seventh. "Hey." Pat nudged her ankle with his foot. "Give her chance, will you?"

Chelsea shrugged. "Sure."

Chelsea most decidedly did not like Marissa. She was brash and loud and smelled of stale air and shredded flowers. She would bang on the door of their apartment at two a.m., convinced that she had left something on the kitchen table, between the cushions on the couch, in the bathroom. Marissa was always forgetting things—her herring bone pea coat, the key to her P.O. box, her birth control pills. Sometimes she liked to forget how to breathe, tying a plastic bag over her head or asking Pat to choke her.

"Almost as good as an orgasm," Marissa would say, the statement accompanied by the universal jerk off motion. "Better with one, of course, but seeing as you're here…"

Chelsea hated Marissa.

**4.**  
In the end, only Marissa and the man who tapped her shoulder enter the viewing room; the remaining three form a cluster in the middle of the antechamber. They are fiddling with their phones, and Chelsea is trying to decide if it's appropriate to escape to the back room and have Geoff take her spot when the man with the soles flapping loose from his topsiders shoves his phone in his pocket and prods the woman next to him. Her head snaps up; tangled hair is caught in the corner of her mouth.

"What?"

"I didn't think an S&W could do that."

The woman rolls her eyes. "Those things can do almost anything. Marissa was probably holding it a bit off kilter, a bit crooked, you know?" She mimes a gun with her thumb and pointer fingers, jerking it to the side in demonstration. "She does that sometimes."

"Well, I'm glad she's not shooting at me."

"I wouldn't be too sure about that. Unless someone fills Jeremy's spot at the table, you're sitting next to her."

The man glances at the viewing room. "It might be worth it, with a kiss like that."

The final member of the group laughs quietly. "Dude, the kiss won't matter if you're dead."

Chelsea remembers the corpse from yesterday, the corpse that is now in the closed casket, one side of its skull shattered, bone chips haphazardly arranged. Ballistics accident, Konrad had said after the delivery men from the coroner's office had left. She shivers. Ballistics something, at least.

She picks at a loose thread in the pocket of her pants, determined to ignore the mutterings of the group in the center of the room, determined to shove the conversation out of her mind. It's not an easy task, especially when Marissa sneaks up on her.

"I thought it was you," Marissa says.

Chelsea twitches and tears the thread.

Marissa is standing close and her lashes are lathered in brown mascara. Her blue flannel shirt is too large and with the top two buttons undone, it is slipping off her shoulder, revealing hard collarbones and a green bra strap.

"Um, yeah," Chelsea says. How do you reply to that?

Marissa just rolls forward, placing a hand on Chelsea's shoulder. "What are you doing working here?" She trails her hand down Chelsea's tricep, across Chelsea's forearm, on Chelsea's palm, then lets it drop.

"Oh, I, uh, took the job after Pat." Chelsea shakes out her hand subtly.

"Kind of perverse, isn't it?" Marissa snaps her gum and the sound echoes around the antechamber. In the viewing room, the mother of the corpse frowns. "Taking a job at a funeral home after your boyfriend dies, I mean."

Chelsea smiles stiffly, pressing her toes harder into the bottom of her black pumps. A toenail snags on the seam of her nylons. "Maybe."

"Eh, whatever," Marissa says. "Your choice." She snaps her gum again, the white bubble briefly brushing against her plum lips before deflating and being pulled inside her mouth. "Anyways, I just thought I'd ask if you want to join our bridge group." She waves her hand at her friends. "Since Jeremy died, we only have five of us, and we need six to have three pairs to rotate in."

Chelsea looks over Marissa's shoulder at the group in the middle of the room. She remembers the conversation from before. "I don't exactly know how to play."

"We'll teach you the rules," Marissa says. "You in?" She smiles. It's the same one that always accompanied _almost as good as an orgasm_.

Closing her eyes briefly, Chelsea nods. "Sure." Her pulse quickens and it's like her blood is flowing in arrhythmic spurts down her arms, into her fingers, and up her neck.

"Cool. You have the same number as before? I'll text you the time and place."

"Yeah." Chelsea nods again.

Marissa's smile morphs into a smirk.

**5.**  
The time is the following night and the place is a nondescript house on the West Side. Chelsea takes the El and walks five blocks into the Lithuanian neighborhood, ringing the doorbell deliberately when she finds the place.

The man with the ratty topsiders opens the door, and Chelsea follows him to the basement. The soft lamp lighting of the first floor dissolves into harsh fluorescent the moment she enters the stairwell, the man pulling the door shut behind them.

The basement is unfinished. The concrete floor is streaked with paint, and the only furniture is a round dining room table with six folding chairs set around it. Four of the chairs are occupied, five when the man sits down, and Chelsea takes the empty seat on Marissa's right. In the center of the table is a plain canvas bag, and everyone is staring at it. Chelsea stares as well.

Marissa pulls the canvas bag towards her and carefully takes out a hard-shelled rectangular case with latches on the front. "This," she says, "is how we play bridge." She flips the latches and opens the case. Inside is a small, silver revolver, the Smith & Wesson crest imprinted on the frame.

Lifting out the revolver, Marissa flips it so the barrel is pointed at Chelsea and pulls a latch, allowing the cylinder to slide out. Chelsea can see Marissa's face through the empty chambers. Her skin is perforated, lips segmented by circles. She snaps the cylinder back in place.

"The deck of cards," Marissa says, setting the unloaded revolver on the table. She reaches into the case and pulls out a single bullet. It glints under the fluorescent lights as she sets it down next to the revolver. "The trump suit is always a .357 Magnum." Marissa closes the case, returns it to the bag, and places it on the floor. "Why don't you take a look." She jerks her chin at the revolver.

Swallowing, Chelsea picks up the Smith & Wesson, fumbling with the cylinder latch when Marissa continues to stare at her. The cylinder falls open onto her left hand, blued steel refusing to reflect her image. She places it back on the table as soon as Marissa looks away, and the woman across from her raises an eyebrow.

"We play a modified version of bridge here," Marissa continues, picking up the revolver and loading it in one smooth motion. She spins the cylinder, a clicking whir, before snapping it closed and pointing the revolver at the man on her left. "Usually we go counter-clockwise, but seeing as it's your first time here…"

Marissa holds the revolver up to the man's head and Chelsea grits her teeth. The man does not move except to lay his hands flat on the table, fingers spread and pushing down on the wood. Marissa pulls the trigger.

A hollow clack echoes across the room, the hammer coming down on nothing, and Marissa calmly unloads the gun and places it back in the middle of the table.

"There's a one in six chance that you end up like Jeremy. If you don't, you get a kiss." Leaning over, Marissa chastely kisses the man, hand briefly cupping his chin before she disengages and turns to look at Chelsea. "You in?"

Chelsea remembers a night last February. She had come home from work late to find Pat and Marissa sitting on the couch. Later that evening, when Marissa had made her excuses and was collecting her coat, Pat had said, "So I'll see you for bridge on Tuesday?"

Marissa had nodded, pulling on her pea coat and mittens. "I'll see you then."

She must have made a little noise, because Pat had chuckled and kissed her on the head. "You can come, too, if you'd like," he had offered. Behind his back, she had seen Marissa smirk.

"No thanks," she had said. "I'm good."

Now, though, things were different.

"Yeah, I'm in."

**7.**  
Geoff is unloading a new stack of boxes from the dolly when Chelsea's phone blips. Geoff, the bastard that he is, snags the phone off the counter before she can look at it.

"Relax. It's just that girl Marissa, not some secret boyfriend you've been hiding from us." He squints at the screen. "Is she your secret girlfriend? Sounds like it. _Coming to bridge club tonight?_ " he affects in a high voice. " _Heart heart_."

Geoff sets the phone back on the counter, and Chelsea checks to see if the message really says that. It does, and she blushes.

Geoff obviously sees the blush. "You," he enunciates slowly, "joined a bridge club because she asked you to."

"Yes?" Chelsea replies, looking down at the box of guest books she is slitting open so Geoff can't see her face.

"Since when do you know how to play bridge?"

"My ex-boyfriend taught me," she says without thinking, then winces. Well, at least it's partially true. Pat tried to teach her bridge once, and he is an ex, seeing as he's dead.

Moving the opened box to the finished pile, Geoff begins to stack the guest books on the shelves above them. "Fine, but since when do people under fifty know how to play bridge?"

Chelsea checks to make sure the order number on the new box matches the list on her clipboard, dating and initialing the row when it does. "Marissa taught him." Another half-truth. They played together, but Chelsea didn't know if she taught him.

Stopping shelving books, Geoff leans on the box Chelsea is working on, preventing her from looking away. "Let me get this straight. This Marissa," he gestures at the phone with the opening blurb of the text still showing on the screen, "invited you to her bridge club. The same Marissa who you told me repeatedly flirted with your ex-boyfriend, the Marissa you hate, and you accepted?"

"Yes?" 

Geoff laughs and pushes the off the box. "Are you sure she's not flirting with you?"

Chelsea remembers the kiss from last week, the smear of plum lipstick Marissa left behind.

"I wouldn't call it flirting. It's more her putting a gun in my face and then slowly deciding to pull the trigger. Weekly."

Geoff laughs again. "You always come up with the strangest analogies."

**6.**  
They are going counter-clockwise tonight, and Chelsea takes a steadying breath when Marissa is the first to pick up the revolver. Chelsea does not look at her, only stares at the woman directly across from her, but she can hear Marissa spin the cylinder of the Smith & Wesson.

The gentle whirring sound is calming against the tension-loaded air.

Chelsea imagines Marissa's plum-colored lips parting slightly with each inhalation.

She does not flinch when cold steel is placed against her temple.


End file.
